In defense of punk science

We discuss the current state of commodification of science and marginalization of individuals and groups outside of the main institutions and research groups. We analyze how the number of publications and not the quality of the knowledge produced has become the de facto currency to buy resources, prestige and power in academia, further oppressing and excluding individuals and smaller groups from building the scientific consensus. Due to the unfortunate and misguided policies of countries, states and institutions privileging numbers over quality, many groups operate true pyramid schemes where those at the bottom, undergraduate, graduate students, lab technicians and post-docs, bear the brunt of the manual and intellectual labor while the upper strata of the pyramid concentrates publications, resources and power. In this system, those at the lower strata are often seen as disposable. We defend that an open-source model of presentation of scientific results with minimal voluntary curation from democratically elected representatives from the scientific community is an alternative to corporations. Public funds used to pay for publishing and access to publications in major corporations could be employed to maintain open-access databases. We defend that the distribution of public funding for research should not follow a free market approach, based on the number of publications as currency, as this leads to the accumulation of power and resources and oppression and exclusion of individuals and smaller groups, especially in developing countries. A do-it-yourself inclusive model is defended as an alternative to a for-profit, commodified, profilicitized model for science